Electrical (junction) boxes are mounted in walls in various ways by different types of brackets. One type of bracket, commonly referred to as a floor stand, is used for mounting an electrical box in a wall where the box is too far from an adjacent wall stud to use a conventional stud-mounted bracket. Also, even if the mounting location is not too far from the adjacent stud, the studs in modern walls can be made of various materials (e.g., wood and metal) and floor stands may be desirable so there is no need to worry about whether or not a particular stud-mounted bracket will be suitable for use with the particular stud in the wall for any specific installation. A floor stand typically uses the floor and/or a horizontal bottom board or plate in the frame for the wall at the floor to support the electrical box above the floor. Some floor stands do not rely at all on the vertical studs in the wall for support. Others may have arms that can be extended to connect to a vertical stud to provide additional stabilizing support in addition to the support from the floor and/or bottom of the wall frame.
One particular type of floor stand is fabricated from sheet metal and is designed for attachment at its lower end to a horizontal floor stud. The bracket extends vertically up from the floor and/or the bottom of the wall frame at the floor and has an electrical box mounting section adjacent its upper end to which an electrical box is fastened. After the bracket and electrical box are installed, the wall is completed by securing appropriate sections of dry wall to the studs. Reference may be made to U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,288,041 and 7,956,285 for examples of such brackets.
Construction plans commonly require electrical boxes to be mounted at various different heights above the floor. One way to address the need to mount electrical boxes at different heights is for workers who install the electrical boxes to carry a plurality of different floor stand models, each having a different height, so a floor stand of the correct height can be used to mount the electrical box at the required height. However, it is more complicated to manufacture multiple different floor stand models and there are added costs associated with tracking inventory of several different floor stand models. It is also possible that the particular model of floor stand needed to install a particular electrical box at the required height might be out-of-stock, even if just locally at the job site, unless inventory requirements and depletion rates are carefully managed.
One solution to this inventory problem is to use floor stands that have a telescoping action so a single model of floor stand can be used to mount an electrical box at any height within a suitable range of heights. This avoids the need to carry and manage an inventory that has multiple different models just to provide the capability to mount the electrical boxes at the different heights. However, telescoping floor stands require overlapping different segments of the floor stand with one another. Thus, more material is generally required to make a telescoping floor stand than a non-telescoping floor stand. When telescoping floor stands are used in a relatively shorter configuration to mount an electrical box at a relatively low height about the floor, the inefficient use of material is particularly pronounced because of the substantial extent the telescoping segments are overlapped in the shorter configuration.
None of the conventional floor stands have satisfactorily addressed these issues.